Day 67 : Heal Me

Filled with a desperate need to think about something other than a stolen POS and perhaps revealing all I found out yesterday, I read something on the forums today. Something that wasn’t a rant, wasn't a comment war, wasn't a troll of proportions so epic that even Sauron would have said “I say old chap, I’m not really sure about this”. You’ve been there. You’ve seen the good posts. You’ve skimmed the hatred and playground insult trading. I’m growing up a tiny bit in EVE terms, beginning to follow the community. I’m even on Twitter (@SpaceNoob1), which is something I never expected and still can’t get used to. I’m not there quite yet, running to catch up, but this post has me interested.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&t=146069

It’s about the ongoing rebalancing of frigates, our first real ships when we join the game, not counting the rookie-mobiles. I’ve been here before, missing out narrowly on a large profit when the Atron got boosted into something that could reliably be used to join the swirl up at 4/4 in Jita or for throwing into Red vs Blue scraps. If I’d made loads of Atrons at the lower mineral costs and stockpiled them, I could have sold them for massive profits after the materials to make them got increased. As a side note I just went to check the prices now and saw http://eve-central.com have a nice little interface upgrade in progress. Not too intrusive a change but makes things clearer and easier to read.

Back to the forum post. It seems that the old mining frigates are to become beginner “logistics” ships. This means healer ships, “logistics” seems to be the EVE term for ships dedicated to remote repair of allies. The new ORE frigate will take up the slack where newbie mining is concerned. I don’t need one of those but I’ll be buying and trying one when they come out. There is no material gain in doing that, I just want to have one!  

Anyway, healer ships. Why do I call them that instead of “logistics”? Firstly because as a Noob I don’t know any better. The name suggests they do far more than “heal” other ships. Finding out what other boosts they supply is on the never ending mental TODO list I’m developing which has to be written down soon before it turns into a short FILO queue instead and stuff begins falling out of my head. The second reason for calling them “healers” is that I played a healer back in Warcraft. I played a healer for a long time, since just before the second Warcraft expansion. I healed through a couple of end game raids. I never could be bothered with the Lich King one. I attempted a couple of heroic raids but they were more pain than they were worth for my limited amount of time in game. I even healed a couple of Flashpoints in SWTOR, I was running the PVE quests on my main as a healer too. EVE was an escape from that role.

I’m now wondering what an initially available healing role would do for me, and for new players coming to the game from other MMOs where the tank/dps/healer roles system is more firmly entrenched. Will I go back to “watching green bars”,  replacing them with small red ones? It would certainly be more difficult here in EVE, perhaps more interesting. Escaping that boxed tank/dps/healer role restriction was one of the appeals of EVE though. I’m trying my hand at anything that comes my way. Apparently Guild Wars 2 is doing away with the role restriction in some fashion. It was on my list of things to try but I just don’t have the time. Perhaps if they add spaceships to it.

Retaining a sense of boxed purpose might give other new players a leg up though. If some new EVE recruits came along having played other MMOs together they might be able to form up a more or less traditional MMO “party”, in EVE a “fleet”, and go out and achieve something more quickly. New players who had been healers elsewhere might get into the social aspect of the game more quickly by looking to fill their traditional role and advertising the fact. Will EVE suddenly see an influx of groups of four or five small ship fleets, manned by one or two month old players? It’s a can flippers worst nightmare. A lot of PVE missions would get played to death. Is it just another scene in the upcoming CCP made feature “The Road To Low Sec”? I need to get there before the reanimated Bing and Bob get there.

There will be a moment or two of confusion at the start for some newbies, since in EVE the “tank” seems to be an attribute every ship has, the amount of damage you can take, rather than a role. In Warcraft during PVP the “tank” role was rarer as the aggro mechanics used to ensure that computer generated enemies always attack the same person don’t translate well to a human opponent attempting to crush whoever he wants. I think SWTOR caused tanks abilities to reduce the damage done to other players, making it an efficient choice to do what a computer opponent would have done - wail on the tank. EVE has similar tactics that could be, and probably are for all I know, adapted. Tackling (reducing the opponents speed and ability to run), and ECM (Electronic Counter Measures - preventing targetting of others) would make you a prime target.

I don’t yet know what happens in fleet actions but I know it would be possible within a week or two to fit a five man fleet with all the necessary roles to do some group missioning, if not PVP, fairly effectively.

I’ve gone way off topic here and started rambling about fleets and the translation of the three MMO roles to EVE. I need to have more of a think, learn some more, and come back to it. Call this a hypothesis and shoot it down for me. I’ll need to read around and see what others have written and I already have a reading list as long as my arm. Most importantly I need to watch the market and start building some frigates. In the meantime if you are out can flipping when these new logistics frigates are out and you are tackled, jammed and swarmed by four or five frigates you can’t seem kill, you know why.

Back in EVE.....

Being a slow week and having little time to get on means that some market orders have gone down. I spend some time reseeding and reactivating markets where the profit was enough to sustain it. In several of those I make sure I have to log in again soon since
I CANNOT STOP FORGETTING TO SET THE DURATION TO HIGHER THAN 1 DAY
A single skipped dropdown that annoys me more than probes. Hopefully probe annoyance will go away soon, I’m going for exploration skills soon and Tiger Ears pointed me at their guide to scanning http://www.tigerears.org/2011/11/28/how-to-scan-the-penny-ibramovic-way/

I think the corporation that does nothing may have another recruit! Don’t worry guys, there is a Bank Holiday in England this weekend and I’m planning on spending a lot of it in EVE to make up for my lack of log on time this week, and I am finally having a think about stuff to do as a small group.